Yes. All software companies now seem to go through the same cycle. Offer a good product at a cheap price or free. Build market share. Start adding features for a fee. Start packaging those features, so you can’t buy the feature you want without buying others. Move to a subscription system. Keep updating to add more monetisation. Start hiding original features behind paywalls. Start to die off.
Obviously, there is the user as product version too which is similar but with ever worsening waste of your time rather than money.
There has been very limited improvements from a general user perspective in either phones, PCs etc over the last decade. It’s been incremental cosmetic only for many. An iPhone 4 or old Nexus phone does most of what current phones do. Graphics has improved for gaming, but games are often less fun and more grinding and cosmetics. It’s infuriating.
We should have a vast wealth of knowledge that is easily accessible. Instead search engines are programmed to sell to us rather than inform us. I think the biggest part is the disparity of knowledge. If Facebook Google etc had to document how much, to the cent, they made off each customer and each search, users would be more savvy and perhaps more willing to avoid them. I think Facebook will try to avoid the paid users in Europe as they will likely be less valuable. If the make their price high enough to cover the same revenue, they will likely have no customers and spook existing customers.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Yes, it matches in a way. However, I think it’s not just enshittification, it’s that the good or even slightly better products get buried beneath all the trash.
Unfortunately,.monetizing users leads to a rush to gain users over having a viable business model or a viable product. The users become the goal and decisions around the product are guided by that
Enshittification is definitely a result of that.
There has been very limited improvements from a general user perspective in either phones, PCs etc over the last decade. It’s been incremental cosmetic only for many. An iPhone 4 or old Nexus phone does most of what current phones do. Graphics has improved for gaming, but games are often less fun and more grinding and cosmetics. It’s infuriating.
See I find this trend kind of interesting. Performance in desktop PC’s plateaued long ago, and soon after laptops, then phones were a little way behind but now they’re at the same point. There really isn’t that much benefit to getting a new phone, so long as your current phone still works (and the main thing there is battery life).
Phones definitely need to be more open. However, I believe that state actors have got their fingers far too deep in the pie - no open source hardware has ever managed to find its way to market, because doing so would deny low level access to the device, perhaps via the black box “security chips” that encryption is often offloaded to. But these are the most personal of devices - they’re the ones we carry with us everywhere we go. They’re the ones we should have the greatest level of privacy with, and instead they have the lowest fundamental security for the user. Even in hackable phones, you often have to “ask permission” from the manufacturer to unlock the bootloader.
Granted, I don’t think low level exploitation is something that most people need to worry about. It seems like whatever backdoors may be in there are kept very well guarded and seldom exploited - rather, they’ll exploit the apps you use first. But apps have so many security holes it’s almost comical.
The NSO’s Pegasus toolkit infiltrated Android phones by sending a WhatsApp call. Through this, they were able to gain full access to the phone in a zero-click exploit. I’m sure there was a bit more nuance to it, but ultimately they expoited privilege WhatsApp had that it really, really shouldn’t have had. WhatsApp patched the exploit, not Android (although I suspect maybe it had something to do with hidden Facebook system apps that manufacturers bundle, outside the Google Play Store).
TL;DR Don’t run any apps unless you have to, or you particularly feel like you can trust them. FOSS is a good start, in particular popular FOSS apps where you can be reasonably sure that someone else is checking the code for their own benefit.
Yes. All software companies now seem to go through the same cycle. Offer a good product at a cheap price or free. Build market share. Start adding features for a fee. Start packaging those features, so you can’t buy the feature you want without buying others. Move to a subscription system. Keep updating to add more monetisation. Start hiding original features behind paywalls. Start to die off.
Obviously, there is the user as product version too which is similar but with ever worsening waste of your time rather than money.
There has been very limited improvements from a general user perspective in either phones, PCs etc over the last decade. It’s been incremental cosmetic only for many. An iPhone 4 or old Nexus phone does most of what current phones do. Graphics has improved for gaming, but games are often less fun and more grinding and cosmetics. It’s infuriating.
We should have a vast wealth of knowledge that is easily accessible. Instead search engines are programmed to sell to us rather than inform us. I think the biggest part is the disparity of knowledge. If Facebook Google etc had to document how much, to the cent, they made off each customer and each search, users would be more savvy and perhaps more willing to avoid them. I think Facebook will try to avoid the paid users in Europe as they will likely be less valuable. If the make their price high enough to cover the same revenue, they will likely have no customers and spook existing customers.
It’s maybe not a perfect fit, but personally I think it’s all shades of enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow here:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Yes, it matches in a way. However, I think it’s not just enshittification, it’s that the good or even slightly better products get buried beneath all the trash.
Unfortunately,.monetizing users leads to a rush to gain users over having a viable business model or a viable product. The users become the goal and decisions around the product are guided by that Enshittification is definitely a result of that.
See I find this trend kind of interesting. Performance in desktop PC’s plateaued long ago, and soon after laptops, then phones were a little way behind but now they’re at the same point. There really isn’t that much benefit to getting a new phone, so long as your current phone still works (and the main thing there is battery life).
Phones definitely need to be more open. However, I believe that state actors have got their fingers far too deep in the pie - no open source hardware has ever managed to find its way to market, because doing so would deny low level access to the device, perhaps via the black box “security chips” that encryption is often offloaded to. But these are the most personal of devices - they’re the ones we carry with us everywhere we go. They’re the ones we should have the greatest level of privacy with, and instead they have the lowest fundamental security for the user. Even in hackable phones, you often have to “ask permission” from the manufacturer to unlock the bootloader.
Granted, I don’t think low level exploitation is something that most people need to worry about. It seems like whatever backdoors may be in there are kept very well guarded and seldom exploited - rather, they’ll exploit the apps you use first. But apps have so many security holes it’s almost comical.
The NSO’s Pegasus toolkit infiltrated Android phones by sending a WhatsApp call. Through this, they were able to gain full access to the phone in a zero-click exploit. I’m sure there was a bit more nuance to it, but ultimately they expoited privilege WhatsApp had that it really, really shouldn’t have had. WhatsApp patched the exploit, not Android (although I suspect maybe it had something to do with hidden Facebook system apps that manufacturers bundle, outside the Google Play Store).
TL;DR Don’t run any apps unless you have to, or you particularly feel like you can trust them. FOSS is a good start, in particular popular FOSS apps where you can be reasonably sure that someone else is checking the code for their own benefit.